Nuthin' much

I puttered around the house today, getting this and that done. Nothing huge, but little accomplishments that add up. We were up early. I12 had to be at church at 7:40 this morning for a final rehearsal and then the youth choir he is in sang at the 8 am service. We're not used to getting around that early on a Sunday morning (we're usually in the 10:30 crowd) but in some ways, it was nice to get home early enough to still have most of the day left.

Lets see, I got some Christmas lights hung outside since the weather is still cooperating with us with low 4os. Nothing spectacular, just icicle lights around the porch. It's funny though, they actually illuminate the porch better than the regular porch lights do.

I cleaned up a bit around the house, washing ziploc bags, doing dishes, a load of laundry and general scrubbing.

V and J15 were hanging drywall in the basement. They're making progress on her room. It has been on hold for a while while other, more pressing matters took priority, but now that work outside is closing in, work inside is becoming more frequent.

I made cranberry mustard for gifting this year- 7 quarter pint jars plus a bit of extra for us. This was a recipe I hadn't used before and I was expecting it to be a bit more mustardy than it turned out to be. Not that it's bad- it just wasn't what I had expected.

I also finally ground some of our corn.

It turned out lavender!

I used a spare coffee grinder that we have from somewhere. It didn't make the cornmeal very uniform, some was ground into flour and some was pretty chunky. But the mix worked and it was very tasty.

It bakes a lavender/gray color.

But OH, so tasty with butter and honey!

The children pronounced it 'wrong' but yummy. They thought the color was odd but they ate it. In fact, of a whole batch there is only one piece left!

We had a lovely, local meal for this dark, chilly day: one of our grass fed steaks, spiced fried potatoes (diced potatoes and onions with pepper and cayenne) corn from my mom and cornbread. A bit heavy on corn but the cornbread was an afterthought- mainly because I wanted to grind some of our corn. The wine V and I had wasn't local- but it went well.

Now, after 4 days off, I've got to think about getting back into work mode for tomorrow. I could SO live the life of simply working on our land and not leaving- but, we're not at that point in our lives and the mortgage needs paid.